Cartel bloodshed stains Los Cabos
Once a haven from Mexico’s carnage, homicides up 250%
LOS CABOS, Mexico — On a recent balmy afternoon in Los Cabos, as tourists and locals frolicked in the sparkling blue sea, a group of men toting automatic weapons stormed onto a crowded beach.
By the time the attackers fled, three men lay dead beneath a grove of palm trees — another sign that the violence roiling other parts of Mexico has arrived at one of the country’s most prized and protected tourist resorts.
Los Cabos, a municipality that encompasses the cities of Cabo San Lucas, San Jose del Cabo and the 20 miles of beachfront resorts between them, has morphed into a battlefield since the arrest last year of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel was once so firmly planted in the state of Baja California Sur that he and other cartel leaders vacationed here safely — along with more than a million American tourists each year. But since Guzman’s arrest and extradition to the U.S., the cartel has fragmented into warring factions, who are fighting each other as well as gangsters aligned with the emergent Jalisco New Generation cartel.
Although none of the recent violence has explicitly targeted tourists — the only known American victim was wounded in the leg by a stray bullet in March — the U.S. State Department in August warned Americans to take extra precautions when visiting Los Cabos.
Baja authorities say drugs, firearms and trained hit men have been arriving by ferry from Sinaloa state, just across the Sea of Cortez, fueling record levels of killings in what is still one of Mexico’s most sparsely populated states, despite a steady stream of Mexican migrants who come to work in the resorts and escape violence or poverty in their home states.
The government launched 232 homicide investigations in the state from January to July, up 250 percent from the same period last year, and up more than 1,000 percent from five years ago.
This year, the state is on track to record an annual rate of 57 killings per 100,000 people — roughly eight times that of Los Angeles.
The vast majority of the violence is playing out in the poor desert communities that house resort workers, far from the beaches that have made this region a magnet for business moguls and Hollywood stars.
Last month, a string of killings in those poor neighborhoods took 16 lives over three days. One of those slain was Jose Mauricio Savala Espinoza, 20, who was shot in the head on a Sunday afternoon near a Baptist church in San Jose del Cabo, three miles inland from a strip of $1,000-a-night hotels.
After the killing, as neighbors peered behind police tape to catch a glimpse of the body and investigators searched for bullets, the victim’s mother erupted in screams.
“Mauricio! Why?” cried Norma Espinoza Escarrega, 47, clutching her face.
She said she and her husband came to Los Cabos from Sinaloa 23 years ago to work in a tortilla factory. Jose Mauricio, one of their four children, had fallen in with gangsters despite her warnings that it could cost him his life.
To combat the violence, the government is building a new base for the Mexican marines in the region, and local hotels have helped pay for additional federal troops.
The recent State Department warnings have officials worried about the potential impact on the country’s $20billion-a-year tourism industry.
Mexican authorities have gone to lengths to portray the violence as affecting only those involved in the drug trade.
Rodrigo Esponda, managing director of the Los Cabos Tourism Board, said that unlike the recent terrorists in Europe, Mexico’s gangsters rarely purposefully target general society.
Aside from the tourists, an estimated 200,000 Americans live throughout the Baja California peninsula. Most in Los Cabos say the violence hasn’t touched them.
On a recent afternoon at Palmilla Beach, the same place where the deadly gunfire erupted weeks earlier, Cindy Slausen relaxed in a chair as her towheaded toddler son played in the sand.
“I feel safer here than in California,” said Slausen, 39, who moved here with her husband a few years ago and now runs a nanny service that caters to foreigners.
For now, people are still coming to Los Cabos — both tourists and the workers who serve them.
Just before sunset one day last week, tourists from California, Pete Lara, 43, and Andy Franks, 32, enjoyed two-for-one beers as bikiniclad women danced on a raised stage.
The friends said that they had taken the precaution of avoiding the highway at night, but that they both felt safe. Joel Reyes, 32, does not. Thin, with scuffed cowboy boots and darkly tanned skin, he arrived three weeks ago from Oaxaca to work construction. He spent five years here while he was in his 20s and had earned enough to buy a plot of land back home. Now he was determined to work three more years to earn enough to build a house.
But things felt different now, he said as he took a seat in a plastic chair for Mass at a humble Catholic church.
“I don’t leave at night,” he said. “I don’t go out drinking. I go from my job to my room. And from my room to my job.”